The mainstream media is amazing. The stuff they publish. The way they manipulate facts to promote their viewpoints. The New York Times is a good example. Recently, the Times ran an editorial noting that investors are running from stocks and buying bonds. The reason for this, says the Times, is that the stock market has become untrustworthy because it isn’t regulated. They don’t know what they are talking about. They ignore the fact that people went into the market when it was unregulated – precisely because it was unregulated. And the Times apparently never stopped to consider that exiting the market right now just might be a good thing. Fox News is another good example. They are always featuring “news” …

Last week in The Palm Beach Letter, Bob Irish wrote a great article on the benefits of reducing one’s expenses as you move into retirement. After a life of accumulating “stuff”, Bob found himself as an empty nester in a big house, with substantial upkeep and overhead. This is what I like to call the “cost of possession”.

Basically there are two tenets of the “cost of possession”

Holding title to something doesn’t mean you have absolute control over it

Having paid for something doesn’t mean it no longer costs you anything to use it.

I learned these lessons soon after buying my “dream home”. I realized that even after paying off a mortgage of $600,000, I was not in any way financially free. To possess and occupy that house was going to cost me more than $30,000 per year—for as long as I “owned” it.

In an op-ed last month in the NYTimes, entreprenuer Graham Hill, detailed his experiences with the burden of possession and shared some interesting factoids to illustrate the point.

In a study published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too jammed with things.

Our fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.

For Bob, though, it wasn’t as simple as just throwing all his worldly possessions away and joining an Ashram. We develop emotional and behavioral attachments to our “stuff” and sometimes its hard to let go. But if you can do it there are enormous payoffs. Here are some of Bob’s “pro’s of downsizing”:

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur or CEO, there are 5 skills you need to master: Hiring superstar employees Firing mediocre ones Managing key employees Recognizing which products to launch and which to kill Determining which advertising campaigns will work You need roughly the same skills to succeed in your personal life: Finding friends and associates who will have a positive effect on you Distancing yourself from people who will have a negative effect on you Working consistently to improve the quality of your personal relationships Recognizing which habits and pastimes enrich you, which are wasteful, and which are self-destructive Eliminating the self-destructive habits and pastimes and gradually replacing wasteful ones with enriching ones

An old friend of mine recently retired. Finding himself with extra time on his hands he took on the project of renovating his home. Owing to his advancing years, he decided it would be best if he spared no expense when it came to his new medicine cabinet. I think the results came out fantastic. He also developed a foolproof chart, in conjunction with his nutrionist, Dr. Bacchus, for the treating of common senior maladies. Disease Wine Daily dose Allergies Chardonay de Paeuf 1 glass Anemia Graves 4 glass Bronchitis Bourgogne or Bordeaux> ( + sugar and cinnamon ) 3 cups Constipation Anjou blanc electricity . Vouvray 4 glass Coronary arteries Dry Champagne 4 glass Diarrhea Beaujolais Nouveau 4 glass Fever …

Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, who were not allowed to be buried together. The Protestant Colonel of Cavalry, JWC of Gorkum married the Catholic damsel JCPH of Aefferden. This “mixed” marriage, at that time (the 19th century), would have given them trouble. The wife wanted to be buried next to her husband, but the difference in their denomination would not allow that. So the Colonel was buried in the Protestant part, against the separation wall and his wife was buried on the Catholic side.

When I started working as an editor at a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter publishing company, my salary was $14,000. My wife was earning less than that. Our two salaries barely covered our basic living expenses. On top of that, I was attending graduate school and we were paying off student loans. Then our first son was born. For the first six months of his life, he slept in an open drawer in our bedroom.

Meanwhile, I was spending money I didn’t have on things I couldn’t afford. Struggling to pay for my education and brand-new family, I overspent because it seemed to provide some happiness, some relief.

But the thrill of buying stuff soon waned. Each new object brought less relief. Eventually, I realized that I was getting 80 percent of my pleasure from experiences that didn’t cost much money. But recognizing that you don’t need junk food and kicking the habit are two distinct things.

Here’s how I got myself out of debt:

First, I got rid of all my credit cards. I figured that what I couldn’t buy with cash was either worthless or worth saving for. Although the fear of going without credit was great, I never experienced any anxiety after I trashed the cards. It seemed like a drastic decision before I made it, but after half an hour I never gave it another thought.

The second thing I did to get out of debt was to start saving. I had made myself a promise that I would save a percentage of my take-home pay, but I never did it. The breakthrough came when I was talking to a friend about how the IRS manages to collect a big chunk of our income through the evil genius of withholding. I recognized I had to do the same thing to myself. The only way I was going to save money was through force.

The solution was available in a new-at-the-time savings-bank program, one that withdrew a set amount of money from my primary account every month and put it in another one. That program allowed me to gradually increase my saving from 10 percent of my income to 25 percent and pay down my debt in a few years.

If you are spending more than you are making, get rid of your credit cards. And to get used to spending less, remind yourself repeatedly that most of the junk you buy (a) becomes unused after a few months and (b) doesn’t provide you with much value anyway. Remember that the best things in life – the picnics you have with your family, the walks you take by yourself, the time you spend with your friends – are free, or nearly so.

Create a separate bank account that you’ll use to pay down your debt, or have your debts automatically deducted from the one account you have. You might even consider a debt consolidator. (But watch out. Most of them are crooked.)

Increase the amount of your take-home that goes into debt payments every month. You might start, for example, with 10 percent and then increase that by 5 percent a month. Six months from now, you could be living on half of what you spend now – and I’ll bet you will be feeling a lot better about yourself. You’ll have less stress, more energy, more confidence, and the beginnings of a lifelong habit of wealth building.

There are so many ways to save money. You can spend less on just about anything without giving up either the pleasure you take in buying or the quality you get from your purchases.

Yesterday, I talked about a few things I do to re-energize myself when my batteries are feeling low. Last month, a NYTimes article pointed to the benefits of high intensity workouts as described in The American College of Sports and Medicine Health and Fitness Journal. It turns out there is a scientific basis for doing short, concentrated exercise, as opposed to longer bouts of medium to low intensity (jogging, 2 hours at the gym looking in the mirror, etc). “There’s very good evidence” that high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Fla., and co-author …